I’m tempted to dub Toward the Terra as ‘The Series that Leap’t Thro’ Time’. Shifts in time are nothing unusual, but Terra does them regularly and always in the same direction, gradually adding to its cast and its setting all the while.

The first time this happened caught me by surprise (I noted on the sixth day how pleasurable surprise can be). I wasn’t expecting the hero of the series to be provided with superpowers and a cool cloak quite so early on. But I should really have noticed that this story is the journey of a people (the Mu), not of a hero. Jomy’s travails can be left in part to the viewer’s imagination, because the show’s about a search for a promised land, and hatred (yes, a one word theme), not the standard ‘hero maturing’ business.

The all-encompassing control of a totalitarian state needn’t be ugly

Oh and there’s the whole ‘man raised as a machine’ thing too. And the gradual world-building process. And the Hellenic nomenclature (‘Ataraxia’, ‘Physis’ and so forth) and aesthetic, featuring lyres, vine leaves and neo-classical columns . . . Though it has certain flaws (a weak first arc and the way the CGI is a bit in-your-face, for example), Toward the Terra is good. Don’t just take my word for it: bateszi has [contains some spoilers] something to say on the subject as well.

4 responses to “Ten Mu A-Questing”

No doubt, Terra will feature in my own Top X of 2007 if I ever get around to writing it (to be honest, this has been a great year for anime). One thing, I really loved the 2nd OP with the song “Jet Boy, Jet Girl”. Also, plot is rather happy to hand out death if the story so requires it… I lost count of the amount of times supposed main characters were suddenly killed off. Anyway, I wish more people would talk about anime like this.